Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Dorothy Baker's acclaimed 1962 novel features an explicitly identified lesbian protagonist, Cassandra Edwards. A brilliant, neurotic Berkeley graduate student, Cassandra navigates a deep emotional crisis rooted in her isolation as a queer woman in the early 1960s, a casual history of sleeping with women at university, and a profound, boundary-blurring codependency with her identical twin sister, whose impending heterosexual wedding she is desperate to sabotage.

Cassandra Edwards is brilliant, deeply unstable, and thoroughly miserable. A Berkeley graduate student avoiding her master’s thesis, she drives home to her family’s California ranch with one clear goal: to stop the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith, to a conventional young doctor. Trapped in a 1960s society that offers no clear path for her identity as a gay woman, Cassandra views her sister’s marriage as the ultimate abandonment. Armed with a sharp wit, an unquenchable thirst for brandy, and a purse full of pills, Cassandra unravels over a tense weekend as she fights to cling to the only person she has ever truly loved.